ENGAGE

The Networked Change Report maps out the strategies and practices that made today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work, while so many others failed to create lasting change on the issues they address.

This paper places the development of sex workers’ movements over the past two decades within the historical context of
feminist discourses on violence against women. The paper discusses the importance of the discourse on violence against
women in framing contemporary abolitionist campaigns that seek to criminalize sex work. It goes on to discuss the
contemporary context, including the status of alliances and dialogue between women’s, LGBTQ, and sex workers’ movements, focusing on India.

The last 50 years have seen the rise of many social movements – struggles or sustained actions taken by groups of people coming together around identity, issues, or strategies formulated by a partial or developing ideology.

CREATE

In order to create the transformation we seek in society, we need to explore a more fundamental transformation in how we work together for social change. Social change requires more than strong organizations—it requires powerful movements for lasting change.

Australian Not-For-Profits need to form a united front to ensure their presence and contributions in the digital world are in line with their ethics, a lead expert on philanthropy , civil society and the digital world has said.

The purpose of this report is to reflect on UNDP’s experience of development cooperation over the past 50 years, and to
extract some common themes and general lessons about development cooperation for the future.

Digitisation is a step change even greater than the internet. Exponential technology advances, greater consumer power and increased competition mean all industries face the threat of commoditisation. The winners will act now, and build a strategic advantage that leaves their counterparts wondering what happened.

LEAD

Much of the work on reform and development has focused on the identification and diagnosis of problems and on the formulation of technically sound measures to address these problems. But the main challenge that often confronts policy makers in attempting to undertake reforms is not in the “What”—what is the problem and what are the remedies for it—but in the “Why”—why does the problem persist, which some research has begun to address—and, more critically, in the “How”—given the Why, how to manage the often complex process of change that accompanies any attempt at reform. It is in the latter where the rubber hits the road.

This concept paper is part of a broader process launched by CREA to analyze and evaluate the impact of its leadership development strategies, and to explore how to strengthen these. The main goal of this exploration was not merely to create new theory –although that is valuable as well – but to advance our mission of bridging theory and practice to build feminist leadership for transformative social justice.

This toolkit is intended to serve not just feminist organisations engaged in issues of human rights and social justice, but also organisations that have programs that focus on women, or are led and staffed, wholly or in part, by women. It represents much of what we at CREA have endeavoured to do in our work both within the organisation and with our partners and networks, i.e. bring into focus forms of leadership that encourage – indeed cultivate – an active citizenship and a collective empowerment. With this toolkit, we hope to take another step towards developing individual and organisational leadership practices that are in harmony with a transformative feminist and social justice agenda.

Other Topics:

World leaders launched the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on 25 September 2015, boosting global aspirations to improve the conditions and opportunities that shape people’s lives and their interactions with the planet. These aspirations are highly relevant: 800 million people live in extreme poverty and 60 million people are currently displaced by conflict (UN 2015a, 8). Limiting global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, let alone below 1.5 degrees Celsius, will be a challenge for all.

Building on the growing recognition that the role of faith-based organizations in addressing the needs of women and girls is critical, a global Platform on “Gender Equality and Religion” was launched on 15 March at the on-going UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Religion’s role in development has generally been viewed with suspicion, if not indifference, in scholarly and institutional concerns with development planning and policy. The last two decades, however, mark a departure, with a burgeoning interest in religion as a category of analysis in development studies. In this paper, I address the religion–sustainable development nexus specifically, and argue that religion – for both its constructive and destructive potential – must be considered in the sustainable development agenda. Specifically, I identify three ways in which religion may play an important role in enabling sustainable development – through its values, through its potential for social and ecological activism and in the realm of self development.

The question is no longer whether religion matters for development. There is compelling evidence that faith-based and religious organizations contribute added value in the field of development—especially in health,
education, and disaster relief. The question now is: how to systematically include the potentials of religious
organizations for development, and according to what principles and criteria?

According to a Pew Study conducted in 2012, eight out of ten people in the world profess to a particular faith. With religion still occupying such a central place in peoples lives, it compels us to recognize that religion has the needed potential to harness and mobilize all sections of society for the social and cultural transformation called for by the UN’s human rights, peace and security, humanitarian and sustainable development agenda, and the Gender Equality Compact that is now prioritized within these thanks to our efforts in the last five years.

The socio-political phenomena that have materialised since 2012, when we first looked at the future of the development industry, have changed the aid landscape in ways that were not then imagined. To recap: our Horizon 2025 paper was an initial effort to stimulate debate on the evolution of the aid architecture. We identified three major disruptors on the horizon: (i) high-impact philanthropy and private donations channelled through non-government agencies; (ii) South-South Cooperation (SSC) emphasising mutual interest of trade and investment, using blended aid and commercial financing instruments; and (iii) the pressures arising from a demand for climate change finance. We quantified these disruptors and identified which aid agencies might need to adapt most as these trends unfolded. Now, five years later, we have the same motivation – to assess the implications of trends that we see as having major potential impact on aid agencies and the international development architecture. We ask whether our scenarios for 2025 have stood the test of time, what we missed, and what we have learned since.